Stories

One should avoid either being a bride, or being in a story. After all, stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Old stories grin like wicked grandmothers who have come to usher you into your wedding bed. They stand behind you, holding you at their arms’ length and fuss over your hair. Their palms grabbing your slightly sweaty ones, they hiss mean little things in your ear with their bad breaths.

You don’t wonder what you were like when you read these stories now. You wonder instead, if any of these stories have come true, here, in the now. And because the way you write now stands in between you and them, the older, discarded stories; you crave to be better.

Here’s one you aren’t entirely ashamed of, here’s another that makes you smile. Like trees and old lamp posts passing us by on journeys that we make every day, our stories stand so –still yet blurring. Now and then, you may cast shy glances at them and wonder why you continued to tell stories knowing you were so bad, knowing there would always be somebody else who could tell that story better.

Did you know that jealousy can speak in two languages and write in none? That’s why they are so darn good. They are bilingual little bastards. They don’t know how to write because they can’t, also because they know that they don’t have to. They can get to you simply by lying there in the Snow Mountains and the mustard fields and the stone chapels. They are telling you it’s pointless to see all this and more when all you are going to do is scramble back into your bed with your laptop, open the new word document because you are so ambitious, blink three times and then watch Game of Thrones.

They know that you will keep the new word document open until the last moment, until all that needs to be watched has been watched, until you sigh into the dying whispers of your closing laptop and go into deep, guilt – free sleep.

New stories are like new lovers. You seek them out by tracing the lines on the palm of their hands, the wet corners of their eyes and lips, and the thickness in their backs. In moments, when time slows down in their eyes, you see the beginning of a tragedy. One that you know is going to leave you battered and poisoned.

On naked afternoons, as the sun empties the room for you two and sends shadow after shadow of windows carpeting up and down your sultry bodies, you wrap each other in stories of shame and embarrassment, of loss and fear. The curtains raise and fall, imitating your breaths and hair as you fling each other from far to close, from close to closer.

You hold them in your arms until you can, until they let you, in much the same way you toy with stories until they need to be written. Because before you know it, they have rescued their arms from your crushing weight; steadied their tired bodies while gathering their clothes, and left you alone with your awake and throbbing nakedness. As you lie listening to the small echo of their footsteps, you hug your cold body and make promises.

Stories are better lovers because they don’t make promises to you. It’s when they begin to, that you need to snuff them out like a candle.